Some Thoughts on Travel Photography

I hadn’t planned to be away so long. Some delays are planned. I had planned, for example, to look again at the arrangements for my web presence.

This was actually suggested to me by a comment made earlier by Mary who was looking at such things as hosting and domains.

I’ve been on the web for several years now, and it seemed a good idea to me to look again and work out which of my websites I wanted to keep to and which I didn’t, and also of course I’ve changed my system of working from standalone websites to, what are known as content management system approaches.

Maybe later I’ll be looking at how the Internet and computing in general affect the life of a stock photographer.

Another problem I had was that just by accident, I actually deleted one of my databases.

How I did it. I don’t know, lots of us do it. Luckily I had a backup.

What I didn’t take into account was a raging tooth infection, which has kept my dentist occupied with my root canals for some time.

So coming back to the actual meat of the blog, I posted a picture which I think shows what you might call an iconic image.

Almost everybody knows the great Sphinx at Giza so the question is, if you are going to be a travel photographer, is this the kind of picture you should be taking or perhaps something quite different?

One of the great things, of course, about digital photography is that it doesn’t always have to be an either or matter.

I’ll give you an example. Many many years ago, I spent several months in Peru trying to take pictures of all the great sites there.

And I clambered around places like Machu Picchu with my Bronica, with two backs for shooting colour transparency film and black and white.

The main problem was that in Peru in general, and certainly in these isolated circumstances, I had hardly any film.

So when I got to Machu Picchu I think I had about two rolls of colour film and I was fairly certain that they would be very difficult to process in country.

Now this, of course, was a pity for me as it meant I had a very restricted ability to shoot my pictures.

Nowawadays things are quite different.

With a digital camera, you have the possibility of choosing and shooting hundreds of different types of picture and this means that often you can take both the iconic pictures, the pictures that everybody recognizes that you think are so great but which you soon find hundreds of other photographers have taken with similar images, or you can choose to take those pictures which capture the everyday life, and changing times of the people.

I personally find these more interesting.

Now as I’ve been asked a lot about travel photography and as travel photography takes into account a very very wide range of photographic skills, I’ve decided in this blog to devote a number of posts entirely to travel photography now and then.

And perhaps at some stage, and I can put all these posts together and make them into an e book. Let’s wait and see.

For the moment, good shooting and I’ll be there to show the other kind of picture.

Just one small point, although this picture is a fairly standard shot, there is something which is perhaps slightly different about it photographically.

See if you can think what.

I’ll give you a clue:

The mega pixel dimensions of this photo, before I reduced it for the web were 3362 x 3161.